


The Humanity Project

by Reynier



Category: Gravity Falls, Transcendence AU- Fandom
Genre: Alcor is trying very hard to be human, Alternate Universe - Transcendence (Gravity Falls), App Rides, Fluff, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-05
Updated: 2020-01-05
Packaged: 2021-02-27 09:42:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,004
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22125034
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Reynier/pseuds/Reynier
Summary: Sometimes you get weird Uber drivers. Sometimes, you get Alcor the Dreambender.
Relationships: Alcor the Dreambender & Original Character
Comments: 31
Kudos: 186





	The Humanity Project

**Author's Note:**

> wrote this in a day because i love everyone on the discord

It was a redeye flight from Zagabria back to Manchester, and besides that there were weather delays crossing the channel, so Gwennyn was appropriately tired by the time she trudged out of the airport. Solar civilisation was quite adept at efficient, faster-than-light travel. Unfortunately, reliable public transport proved far more elusory. 

And so it was approaching 3 am when she finally found herself at the apprides terminal. “Portr home,” she enunciated into her phone. 

_I’m sorry,_ the app printed, _we’re having trouble hearing you._

“Portr!” she repeated. “Home!” 

_I’m sorry, I’ll need you to repeat that._

Gwennyn made a noise which was very nearly a growl, and then said a word which fully achieved being a curse. “Portr home now!” she yelled. 

_I’m sorry, we’re having trouble hearing you._

“You damn thing!” she screamed, shrilly, and then slapped a hand over her mouth out of embarrassment. Fortunately, there was no one else on the rain-drenched platform to bear witness, so she sighed, and spoke very clearly: “Fuck you.”

_Well, fuck you too,_ printed the app, and then her phone died. 

She waited another five minutes, furiously cold and trying to think of what she could do, before the car pulled up in front of her. It was black, and had a gold Portr sticker on the front window, although the hoverjets were gilded gold in a manner which suggested either careless wealth or a pathetic pretense at opulence. Considering it was a Portr car, it was probably the latter. 

The passenger window rolled down. Gwennyn peered in, but couldn’t see anything.

The car waited. Gwennyn waited. Eventually, it became clear that nothing was going to happen unless she initiated it, so she knocked hesitantly on the door. “Hello?” she said. “Who are you here to pick up?”

“Uh…” came a voice from inside. Things that might have been eyes glinted. “Looks like… Gwennyn Marc’had? Twenty-four years old and a bit?”

That really should have been her first sign. Portr certainly had more data on her than she would have liked, but it didn’t share her age with the drivers. But she was too tired to think straight, so she yanked open the door and sat down, shoving her backpack under the seat. 

The door clicked shut, and she sighed. “I didn’t think my ride request went through,” she said, and turned to look at her driver. “I’m really glad you got it.”

Her driver, a humanoid around her age with gold eyes and pointed ears, shrugged. “Eh,” he said. “I pick up the slack.”

That didn’t make any sense, but she ignored it in favour of closing her eyes for a blessed moment’s peace. “Must suck being out here so late, though. Or early, I guess.”

Her driver laughed, and started the car. “Not so bad. I don’t sleep much. Flight came in late?”

“Yeah. I’m Gwennyn, by the way-- or, I guess you already know that.”

“Ah, yeah. Omniscience, and all that.”

Gwennyn chuckled, and nodded. She thought about tacos for several minutes, before the word ‘omniscience’ finally percolated down into the single-core CPU that was her brain, and sparked a question mark. “Uh, what?”

“Sorry, I should have introduced myself.” Her driver pivoted to face her, in direct contradiction of all driving safety laws, and held out a white-gloved hand. “Alcor the Dreambender.” Gwennyn blinked, and didn’t do much else. “Like… the demon?” he tried. 

“Oh,” she said, “yeah.” Then she screamed. 

He waited politely for her to finish, which took several minutes, and then pressed a switch on the dashboard. “Do you mind the radio? You can pick the channel. We’ve got… uh… Unholy Symphonic Scream Board, Death and Torture FM, Heavy Metal Organ Busters, and BBC Radio 4.”

Faced with the prospect of listening to reruns of _The Archers,_ she found her voice. “Do you have anything that isn’t any of those things?”

He leaned forward to peer at the console. “Ads for mattresses?” he offered. 

“Yeah, sure.” 

_“...joint mattress dealership, get your savings today! Full of none but goose up down and find your flavour. Just on pillows and deals with the savings stock card for biannual sales mattress dealership! Mattress!”_

A tongue that was far too long to be anything approaching human extended from Alcor’s mouth, and he licked his lips. “Raw goose sounds good right about now, eh?” he said, as though it was a relatable comment.

“No! Normal food sounds good. Are you.. _trying_ to be terrifying?”

This seemed to hurt his feelings. “No,” he said defensively, “I’m _trying_ to reintegrate myself into the job market.”

“... _why?_ ”

“Ah,” said Alcor, and held up a finger. “To Meet New People! It’s the first step to self-improvement.”

“You’re a centuries-old demon.”

“I’m a _millenia_ -old demon, thank you very much.”

“Right,” said Gwennyn, and tried not to think about the fact that her Portr driver was older than the Liberated Republic of Uttoxeter. “You’re a millenia-old demon who….” The horror dawned on her. “Oh gods, where are you taking me?”

“439 Atkinson Drive?”

The fact that he knew her address did nothing to assuage her hysteria. “You’re just taking me home?”

“Yeah. Unless you’d rather I dropped you off somewhere else?”

“No, no, home is…” She swallowed. “Home is good. Uh… are you actually on Portr’s staff role?” 

He looked strangely guilty, for a demon. “No, I just kind of stuck their sticker on my windscreen? I tried to get a job with them, but the guy interviewing me was from the Cal Fed and didn’t believe I wasn’t a huge fan of murder at the moment.”

“And you’re not?” said Gwennyn, tentatively. 

“Hm?”

“A huge fan of murder?”

“Oh! No. I’m doing pretty good right now. A bit lonely, I guess. What about you, anything going on in your life?”

“I thought you had omniscience.”

“Well, yeah, but the Portr driver manual says to engage the passenger in small talk.”

“Uh, right,” said Gwennyn. There must be something safe she could tell him. “I’m getting my first book published.”

Alcor grinned beside her, his teeth unnatural and sharp and far too numerous. “That’s great! Congratulations. What’s it about?”

This was already a level of detail that she in no way felt comfortable divulging to the most deadly demon in history, but there was no turning back now. “It’s just a sci-fi thriller,” she said. “It’s about a couple who realises all their memories of meeting each other are fake, and they’re actually mortal enemies who’ve been mindwiped. So they have to work together to solve the conspiracy and, you know, get revenge.”

“Epic!” said Alcor. “That sounds great. Did you ever read _Paris Streetlamps_?It kind of reminds me of that.”

“I’ve never heard of that, sorry,” said Gwennyn, and tried to ignore how surreal this entire conversation was. It seemed, miraculously, as though Alcor the Dreambender was trying very hard to be nice, and as though he thought her book sounded fun. “Who’s it by?”

“Uhh…. Wang Chuan’gao, I think? It’s been a while since I read it.”

“I’ll look it up,” Gwennyn said, with the utter certainty that when she did, she would find _Paris Streetlamps_ had been published hundreds, if not thousands, of years before. Now that the panic had died down, she was feeling oddly at ease. It must have been the lack of sleep. “So you’re just driving around picking up people who need a lift?”

“I needed to get out of the house, you know,” said Alcor. “These last few centuries it’s been a bit-- oh, hold on, I’m getting a call.”

He did not appear to have a phone , or indeed anything that might receive a call. “A call?”

“Yeah, I’m getting summoned. Somewhere in… Botswana? Do I know anyone in Botswana? I’ll be back in just a sec.”

He was gone before Gwennyn could plead with him not to disappear in the middle of driving through the narrow streets of Manchester. She just barely managed to grab the steering lever, and tried to yank it back, but found it was stuck. The car jolted to a halt nonetheless, and she was seriously considering grabbing her bag and bolting when she realised that the vehicle was hovering twenty yards off the ground. 

“Right,” she said, and clutched the sides of her seat, “that’s a no on that front.”

She waited for a good ten minutes before realising she either needed to amuse herself or she would fall asleep-- and falling asleep in a demon’s car did not seem like a particularly intelligent idea. Her phone was dead, and she was travelling light, so there was nothing to read in her bag. The car itself was pristine; clean in a slightly unnatural way. There was, however a glove compartment. 

It would probably be a bad idea to open the glove compartment in a demon’s car. 

_He eats humans,_ she told herself. She remembered that much from her uni demonology course. _He eats humans alive and there could be all manner of horrors in his glove compartment._

Gwennyn opened the glove compartment. 

The first thing she found was highly innocuous: a scuffed black volume with the title _Toyota Corolla User Manual_ on the front. It was quite probable that this was a stolen car, although what self-respecting demon would want to steal a car line that had gone out of business several hundred years ago was beyond Gwennyn. 

Beyond the user manual there were several bags of what might, in polite company, be termed ‘food,’ but which to Gwennyn looked suspiciously meaty. It might have been beef. She decided that unless she was proved otherwise, it was beef. 

She placed the book and the suspicious jerky on the driver’s seat, hoping very fervently that Alcor would not reappear until she had put them back. Then she went back to the glove compartment. There were a couple of small objects shoved in the back, one of which was a tiny yellow lawyerpad on which someone had painstakingly written out a To-Do list. It read:

_X Meet New People_

_X Find Those With Common Interests_

_X Remember Humans Can Be Friends, Not Food_

_X Go to Gym_

_X Practice Passing as Human_

_X Do Calligraphy?_

_X Always Take Summons! Be Nice!_

....it was, in a mildly terrifying sense, quite charming. Gwennyn smiled. It was hard enough passing for human when you were one-- perhaps forgetting how to be a person was a key part of what being one actually was. This struck her as very deep; she nodded to herself, feeling very proud of her philosophising, and then stuck her hand back in the glove compartment. 

The last thing in it was a fountain pen.

  


When Alcor got back from his summoning, which turned into a very long catch-up conversation with a lonely young Mizar, Gwennyn Marc’had was fast asleep. Various items which should have been in his glove compartment were scattered on his seat, but he couldn’t find it in himself to be angry. The young woman he should have dropped off an hour ago was curled on the passenger’s seat, something yellow clutched in her hand. He pried it free. It was his notepad, with the list of goals he had drawn up for himself when he realised he was absolutely miserable and needed to get out more.

The human had scrawled something next to his shaky handwriting, in a far neater hand than he had. Her words looped up and down, and he smiled as he read them. 

_Being human is very hard,_ she had written. _But you don’t need to be a perfect human to have friends._

She had dotted the I of ‘friends’ with a little heart. 

Gwennyn would wake up the next morning feeling unusually rested, with absolutely no memory of how she had gotten from Alcor the Dreambender’s infernal lift ride service to her bedroom, or indeed of where the extra heated blanket had come from. 

This was terrifying, in a sense. 

It still made her smile. 


End file.
